For almost 84 years, Lynchburg s own haunted rocking cradle has been lost to public record and reduced to rumor, little more than a ghost story retold every Halloween.
Pure America: Eugenics and the Making of Modern Virginia - A Discussion with Author Dr. Elizabeth Catte Community Event Tuesday, April 27, 2021 - 7:00pm to 8:30pm
Between 1927 and 1979, more than 8,000 people were involuntarily sterilized in five hospitals across the state of Virginia. From this plain and terrible fact springs Elizabeth Catte’s Pure America, a sweeping, unsparing history of eugenics in Virginia, and by extension the United States.
Join us as we invite Dr. Elizabeth Catte, author of What You Are Getting Wrong About Appalachia , to discuss her new book Pure America and the legacy of the eugenics movement in the American South and beyond.
In
Pure America: Eugenics and the Making of Modern Virginia, Dr. Elizabeth Catte expertly investigates and contextualizes the local history of eugenics in Staunton, Virginia. The story of the former Western State Lunatic Asylum now renovated as a luxury hotel and pricey condos demonstrates how race, gender, class and capitalism intersect in the American eugenics movement to uphold white supremacy, control women, and exploit disabled and impoverished people. Catte stresses that this history is not “forgotten,” but rather has been purposely omitted by those in power. Furthermore, her book reveals that eugenics still influence our society today. I recently had the pleasure of interviewing Catte about her latest book,
The abandoned Western State Hospital, c. 2004, since renovated into the Blackburn Inn. Image: Kipp Teague
Elizabeth Catte’s new book examines how Virginia progressives believed the forced sterilization of poor whites would pave the way to a bright future and how their legacy endures in national parks and prisons.
Pure America: Eugenics and the Making of Modern Virginia
Elizabeth Catte
When Elizabeth Catte began researching
Pure America, her new book about the history of eugenics in Virginia, her first act seemed, on its surface, like a non sequitur: she spent a night at a new luxury hotel, the Blackburn Inn, in her hometown of Staunton, Virginia. What interested Catte was that, in its former life, the building that now houses the Blackburn Inn had been the Western State Hospital or, as it was better known upon first opening in 1828, the Western State Lunatic Asylum. It was where many Virginians deemed “feeble-minded” were incarcerated under the directorsh